meditation

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My doctor recently suggested I stop multi-tasking. Focus on one thing at a time, she said: our brains aren’t wired to take on the kind of intense juggling — from chauffeuring to food prep, extracurricular logistics, work strategies, worry over aging parents, anxiety about climate change — that many of us attempt (with varying degrees of success) every day.

For me, meditation and yoga offer a lifeline: a quiet sanctuary where focusing on one thing is the only thing required.

So I was slightly annoyed by the headline of a recent Scientific American story: “Is Meditation Overrated?”

The premise of the piece is this: Many people report that meditation improves their mood and relieves various symptoms of chronic stress and other health problems, BUT the data on this isn’t terribly robust. So, the story continues, “Johns Hopkins University researchers carefully reviewed published clinical trials and found that although meditation seems to provide modest relief for anxiety, depression and pain, more high-quality work is needed before the effect of meditation on other ailments can be judged.”

So shouldn’t the headline be: “Meditation Relieves Some Modern Woes; More Research Needed To Conclusively Prove Further Benefits?”

April 25, 2014 | 10:04 PM | Alexandra Morris

Or, put another way, does mindfulness — the deliberate act of paying attention to the present moment and observing your thoughts drift by — have a place in psychiatric care?

The answer, according to some doctors: yes, maybe, at least for some patients.

At a conference held earlier this month at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, psychiatrists David Lovas of Dalhousie University and Zev Schuman-Olivier of Harvard Medical School and the Cambridge Health Alliance made the case for and against mindfulness and psychiatric drugs in treating patients with depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses.

Over the past twenty years or so, the number of patients taking antidepressants and antipsychotics has increased substantially. And in many cases, patients are on multiple drugs at once: one third of psychiatric outpatients are on three or more drugs, according to one study.

(Synergy by Jasmine/flickr)

So researchers have begun to examine whether mindfulness, which can include walking meditation, body scan meditation (to bring awareness to each part of the body in turn), mindful eating or yoga, or mindful listening can significantly reduce some of the anxiety and distress associated with such illnesses.

“We’re witnessing a culture that is focused and organized in some ways around medication as a primary form of treatment,” said Schuman-Olivier. “On the other hand, people can overstate the power of mindfulness intervention.”

It’s a careful balancing act, they say: for some, mindfulness-based therapy may be more effective at relieving stress and addressing mental health symptoms, while others may benefit more from medications or a combination of medication and meditation.

In some cases, mindfulness can produce negative side effects – it has been shown to draw out negative memories of past events.

Still, mindfulness meditation is being adopted more and more as a practice to improve health and mental well-being. The U.S. Marines, for example, are using these meditation practices to improve their attention and working memory, according to a recent New York Times report.

Earlier this year, JAMA Internal Medicine published a paper that looked at how mindfulness meditation programs affect stress and well-being. Continue reading →

Add this to the growing body of evidence that meditation and activities that focus the mind can greatly improve your mood and health:

A new study found that patients with severe heart trouble who attended a non-denominational spiritual retreat for just a few days were more hopeful about the future and less depressed following the getaway. In a news release, researchers from the University of Michigan report:

Heart patients who participated in a four-day retreat that included techniques such as meditation, guided imagery, drumming, journal writing and outdoor activities saw immediate improvement in tests measuring depression and hopefulness. Those improvements persisted at three- and six-month follow-up measurements.

The study was the first randomized clinical trial to demonstrate an intervention that raises hope in patients with acute coronary syndrome, a condition that includes chest pain and heart attack. Previous research has shown that hope and its opposite, hopelessness, have an impact on how patients face uncertain futures.

Readers, do you have a spiritual or nonspiritual practice that makes you more hopeful or less depressed? We’d love to hear your stories.

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Massachusetts is the leading laboratory for health care reform in the nation, and a hub of medical innovation. From the lab to your doctor’s office, from the broad political stage to the numbers on your scale, we’d like CommonHealth to be your go-to source for news, conversation and smart analysis. Your hosts are Carey Goldberg, former Boston bureau chief of The New York Times, and Rachel Zimmerman, former health and medicine reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

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